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Ficaia

Joined 4 March 2021
It's simple. I just remove everything that is not David. ~ Michelangelo
  • ... a peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiæ, loosely tied...
  • I am the worm who never turned,
       The eunuch without a harem;
    Between the priest and the commissar
       I walk like Eugene Aram.
  • Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
Women
  • Women can’t forgive failure.
  • It’s nice to meet serious people
    And hear them explain their views:
    Your concern for the rights of women
    Is especially welcome news.
    I’m sure you’d never exploit one;
    I expect you’d rather be dead;
    I’m thoroughly convinced of it—
    Now can we go to bed?
  • Procul hinc, procul este, severae!
    • Away from me, far away, ye austere fair!
    • Ovid, Amores, bk. 2, no. 1, l. 3 (tr. Grant Showerman, 1914)
  • Kings’ daughters were among thy honourable women: upon thy right hand did stand the queen in a vesture of gold, wrought about with divers colours.
    • Psalm 45:10 (KJV)
  • The King’s daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is of wrought gold. She shall be brought unto the King in raiment of needlework: the virgins that be her fellows shall bear her company, and shall be brought unto thee.
    • Psalm 45:14 (KJV)
  • Instead of thy fathers thou shalt have children: whom thou mayest make princes in all lands.
    • Psalm 45:17 (KJV)
  • Women never look so well as when one comes in wet and dirty from hunting.
  • With many women I doubt whether there be any more effectual way of touching their hearts than ill-using them and then confessing it. If you wish to get the sweetest fragrance from the herb at your feet, tread on it and bruise it.
More work needed
  • L’extension des priviléges des femmes est le principe gènèral de tous progrés sociaux.
  • His sayings are generally like women’s letters; all the pith is in the postscript.
  • The fundamental situation, whether it deserves to be called ambiguous or not, is that a word or a grammatical structure is effective in several ways at once. To take a famous example, there is no pun, double syntax, or dubiety of feeling, in
         Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,
    but the comparison holds for many reasons; because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, becauce they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved into knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallised out of the likeness of a forest, and coloured with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves, because they are now abandoned by all but the grey walls coloured like the skies of winter, because the cold and Narcissistic charm suggested by choir-boys suits well with Shakespeare’s feeling for the object of the Sonnets, and for various sociological and historical reasons (the protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of puritanism), which it would be hard now to trace out in their proportions; these reasons, and many more relating the simile to its place in the Sonnet, must all combine to give the line its beauty, and there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind. Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect, and the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

United States

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  • We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.
  • [W]hence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia... could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.
  • In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky — her grand old woods — her fertile fields — her beautiful rivers — her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, ... [w]hen I remember that all is cursed with the infernal actions of slaveholding, robbery and wrong, — when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.
  • No day ever dawns for the slave, nor is it looked for. For the slave it is all night — all night forever.
    • A freed black man
  • I'd ruther be dead than be a nigger on one of these big plantations.
    • A white Mississippian
  • You know what I’d rather do? If I thought… had any idea that I’d ever be a slave again, I’d take a gun and just end it all right away! Because you’re nothing but a dog. You’re not a thing but a dog! Night never come without you had nothing to do. Time to cut tobacco... if they want you to cut all night long out in the field you cut. And if they want you to hang all night long, you hang…hang tobacco. It didn’t matter about your tired…being tired. You’re afraid to say you’re tired. They just... well...
    • Fountain Hughes [1]
  • There was never a moment during this time when the slavery issue was not a sleeping serpent. That issue lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It was, owing to the invention of the cotton gin, more than half awake at the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803; and slavery was continued in the Louisiana Territory by the terms of the treaty. Thereafter slavery was always in everyone's mind, though not always on his tongue.
    • John Jay Chapman [2]
  • South Carolina is too small for a republic, but too large for an insane asylum.
    • James L. Petigru
  • The bird of our country is a debilitated chicken, disguised in eagle feathers. We have never been a nation. We are only an aggregate of states, ready to fall apart at the first serious shock.
    • George Templeton Strong
  • O dearer than the daylight to thy sister, wilt thou waste, sad and alone, all thy length of youth, and know not the sweetness of motherhood, nor love’s bounty? Deemest thou the ashes care for that, or the ghost within the tomb?

History of Australia

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  • Namaaraalee is highest, he made it all,
    We must keep those ways he pointed out.
  • At its own Wunger place
    A spirit waits for birth.
    • Recounted by Sam Woolagoodjah, elder of the Worrorra people of the Kimberley. Tr. Andrew Huntley from the prose version of Michael Silverstein. Reported in The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986), p. 1
  • Generally young, shallow-brained fellows, proud of their uniform, treating the diggers overbearingly, and bringing down invectives upon the Government through its servants.
    • Mrs Andrew Campbell, wife of the Ballarat police magistrate; Lawrence L. Sharkey, Australia Marches On (Sydney: New South Wales Legal Rights Committee, 1942), p. 282
  • But with all its golden advantages, Australia has yet greater for the emigrant who prefers the comforts and decencies of life to bartering his soul for gold. In Australia, as elsewhere, Mammon carries his curse with him, and his worshippers must partake of it. Drunkenness, debauchery, crime, and immorality, in every shape, are the characteristics of such a society as is now gathering in the gold districts. There are thousands of respectable families in England whose interest it would be to emigrate, but who would not encounter such a condition for all the gold Australia contains.
    • George Butler Earp, The Gold Colonies of Australia, and Gold Seeker’s Manual (London: George Routledge, 1853), p. 2
  • Thank God there is some prospect of a cessation of the cursed gold seeking for some time owing to the creeks becoming dry. The rascals can’t wash [gold] without water ... It is really ludicrous to see the feeling of indifference (not to say contempt) with which everything appertaining to squatters or squatting is now treated in Melbourne ... They will not always remain under a cloud. The profits of labor will be equalized in time while we have a monopoly of the land which with the help of God we will keep in spite of the Melbourne gold worshippers. Our time will come yet, land will tell in the long run. No one can blame us using any powers circumstances may place within our reach. We are the victims at present, let us hope we shall be the sacrificers by & bye.
    • Squatter William Forlonge to C. Barnes (late 1851); W. Forlonge to C. Barnes, 30 December 1851, pp. 3-4, SLV, MS Box 111/5: reported in Peter FitzSimons, Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution (2012), ch. 4, epigraph
  • [Outsiders] cannot imagine the state of things here. Men who have been servants all their lives are now, after a few weeks work at the diggings, independent.
    • Victorian squatter Alfred Burchett (January 1852); Gregory Blake, To Pierce the Tyrant’s Heart (Loftus: Australian Military History Publications, 2009), p. 12
  • All aristocratic feelings and associations of the old country are at once annihilated ... It is not what you were, but what you are that is the criterion.
    • John Sherer, an English digger; The Gold-Finder of Australia: How He Went, How He Fared, and How He Made his Fortune (London: Clarke, Beeton & Co., 1853), p. 10
  • It is every man’s business to take care of himself here. They are just as independent in their speech as in their actions. It is a wonderful place to take the conceit out of men who expect much deference. The Governor was yesterday riding along among this crew, attended by one soldier; but not the slightest notice was taken of him, not even by a touch of the hat. They are just as free in helping themselves to your property.
    • William Howitt, describing Melbourne in 1852; Land, Labour, and Gold, or Two Years in Victoria with Visits to Sydney and Van Diemen’s Land (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman, 1855), p. 25
  • Rossinhol en son repaire
    M' iras ma dona vezer;
    E ill diguas lo mieu afaire, ...
    • Go, nightingale, and find the beauty I adore;
      My heart to her outpour:
         Bid her each feeling tell,
         And bid her charge thee well,
      To say that she forgets me not.
    • Ascribed to Dalfi d'Alvernha in M. Raynouard, Choix des poésies originales des troubadours, vol. 5 (1820), p. 292. Versified from Sainte-Palaye Millot French prose translation and ascribed to Peire d'Alvernhe in Edgar Taylor, Lays of the Minnesingers (1825), p. 243
  • Her Eye-Brows from a Mouse’s Hyde,
    Stuck on with Art on either Side,
    Pulls off with Care, and first displays ’em,
    Then in a Play-Book smoothly lays ’em.
  • Moe: Listen, Bustoff, you can't drink that! That's alcohol.
    Bustoff: No, that's not alcohol. That's just a little tequila, vodka, and cognac.
    Curly: Oh, that's different. Go ahead!
  • On sleds reclin’d, the furry Russian sits;
    And, by his rain-deer drawn, behind him throws
    A shining kingdom in a winter’s day.
  • They went out into the glaring white sunlight. The heat rolled from the earth like the breath of an oven. The flowers, oppressive to the eyes, blazed with not a petal stirring, in a debauch of sun. The glare sent a weariness through one’s bones. There was something horrible in it—horrible to think of that blue, blinding sky, stretching on and on over Burma and India, over Siam, Cambodia, China, cloudless and interminable.
  • The brazen-throated clarion blows

  Across the Pathan’s reedy fen,
And the high steeps of Indian snows
  Shake to the tread of armèd men.

  • And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,
    Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.
    • A Midsummer Night's Dream, II, i, Oberon
  • Under an oak, whose boughs were mossed with age
    And high top bald with dry antiquity,
    A wretched ragged man, o’ergrown with hair,
    Lay sleeping on his back; about his neck
    A green and gilded snake had wreathed itself,
    Who with her head, nimble in threats, approached
    The opening of his mouth. But suddenly,
    Seeing Orlando, it unlinked itself
    And with indented glides did slip away
    Into a bush; under which bush’s shade
    A lioness, with udders all drawn dry,
    Lay couching, head on ground, with catlike watch
    When that the sleeping man should stir.
    • As You Like It, IV, iii, Oliver
  • We have scorch’d the snake, not kill’d it.
    • Macbeth, III, ii, Macbeth
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